


i need you—moonlight

by woodlands



Category: Black Sails
Genre: First Kiss, M/M, Mentions of Miranda - Freeform, Mentions of Thomas - Freeform, Tattoos, extremely incorrect tattoo aftercare i assume, mentions of gates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:48:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27808594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/woodlands/pseuds/woodlands
Summary: Silver claps Flint on the shoulder convivially and Flint flinches—hard.In which Flint adds to his tattoo collection.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw/John Silver
Comments: 19
Kudos: 93





	i need you—moonlight

**Author's Note:**

> title bastardized from dua lipa’s ‘levitating’.

“Well,” says Silver, loudly and mostly for the benefit of the crew, “I ought to call it a night. I’ve had enough rum for two men at least.” 

Flint is standing by the stairs, and, unthinking, Silver claps him on the shoulder as he goes by. Three things happen at once: one of the gunners—Davies?— chokes on his ale; Silver yanks his hand back like it’s burnt; and Flint flinches, _hard_. 

It’s an unspoken rule but a rule nonetheless: no one touches Flint. 

—

No one touches Flint, but Silver can’t seem to get that through his head in any way that sticks. When he finds Flint in his cabin later, he’s helpless to stop himself: the fabric of Flint’s shirt is coarse under his palm when he rests his hand above the place that made Flint recoil so obviously.

“Fuck’re you doing,” Flint says, but there’s no anger in it. He hasn’t said anything else since Silver knocked, stepped inside, closed the door behind him. Just sat quietly on the bench by the window and watched him approach. 

Silver shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says, honest. 

He watches Flint’s eyelashes dart down and back up in a blink, a distraction, a decoy, from the unwavering darkness of his irises trained on Silver’s face. When Silver looks away, it feels like a concession. A confession. 

His hand is still resting, just gently, on Flint’s upper arm. It dawns on him that there’s something wrong with the way Flint is holding himself.

He presses down on Flint’s arm, hard. He’s looking at Flint’s face, so he doesn’t miss it: a wince, his mouth falling open on a gasp. 

It makes heat rise to Silver’s face. He tries not to think about why, hopes the dim light of the cabin keeps Flint from noticing. He thinks about grinding the heel of his palm into the fabric just to see what reaction he can get. 

Instead, he lets his fingers drag lightly up Flint’s shoulder to the collar of his shirt. “I don’t know,” he says again, even though Flint hasn’t asked. His voice is—vulnerable, a little too quiet, nearly a whisper. He’s sure Flint can hear the echo in it, the cadence of his blood thrumming through his body, vibrating in his throat. He’s so close to Flint’s own, his fingers half an inch away from bare skin, the dip between his clavicles. 

“I don't like it,” he tells Flint, “Not knowing.” He leans into his crutch with his armpit and brings the hand not already touching Flint up to the first button that’s done up. Touches it with his forefinger. 

“What is it you want to know?”

When he undoes the button, Flint swallows hard; Silver watches the whole process, how it starts in Flint’s mouth and works down through his throat, nudging against Silver’s thumb. He slides his hands down and undoes another.

He can feel Flint twitching under his hands, the skin of his chest and then abdomen reacting to every brush of his knuckles. “Tell me, Captain,” he murmurs, swaying forward with the roll of the ship, the sweet fire of the rum in his belly, “We haven’t taken a ship by force in weeks. What injury have you sustained that still pains you this much?”

Flint looks surprised, before his features school back into the careful blankness he’s been wearing. He doesn’t say anything, and Silver takes it as an invitation. The shirt makes a soft sound like paper being touched when he moves his hand, dragging his fingers on the diagonal up Flint’s chest, over the plane of his pectoral, to the peak of his shoulder.

The shirt, open nearly to his navel, falls down Flint’s arm.

At first, Silver thinks Flint’s been branded: two raised marks, the skin angry and red, like twin burns. But when he tilts his head a little and the moonlight through the window comes filtering in, he sees them for what they are: two tattoos, stacked one above the other, just beginning to heal.

“Oh,” he says. 

The moon, he remembers from when he pulled Flint from the sea, months ago. When Flint told him about Thomas Hamilton, Silver had wondered about the little tattoo. Now, staring down at the irritated skin below it—a sun, and an eye inside a pyramid— he begins to feel certain about something for perhaps the first time tonight. 

“I don’t plan on making a habit of it,” Flint tells him, and it strikes inside Silver, that Flint knows him this well. To have the surety that Silver would put it all together and to understand where he would go next. “You won’t get one of your own, if you die before I do.”

Three partners: Mrs. Barlow, a wife; Hal Gates, a friend; Thomas Hamilton, a lover. John Silver—

“I don’t plan on dying at all,” he says, nonsensically. He touches the moon with his forefinger. 

Flint chuckles, turns his head to look at him. “Expecting you’ll be able to talk your way out of it?”

“I’ve done it before.” _And lost a leg in the process_ , he doesn’t say.

It’s never silent on the ship. But it’s quiet, in here with Flint. _James,_ he tries in his head, and can feel his face flush with embarrassment as if he had said it aloud. “But if I’m going to die,” he says, scrambling to fill the silence, to distract Flint so he doesn’t notice what’s so obviously written across Silver’s face, “I hope I’m laid out on a beach somewhere, leagues from Nassau, fat, drunk, and rich as a king.”

A snort from Flint. “And here I thought you’d given up on the pursuit of wealth.”

“Reformed? Me? No. I’ve just decided the gold isn’t the only thing worth chasing in life.” He straightens on his crutch and closes his eyes for a second, annoyed at his own honesty. 

Flint doesn’t ask him, but the question hangs between them anyway. He’s not sure, if Flint were to have asked, what he would have answered: the respect of the crew? A name, a legacy, to strike fear in the hearts of men? He thinks of Thomas Hamilton, of Miranda Barlow, of Hal Gates, and imagines Flint asking, _what is it you are chasing that isn’t the gold_ , and himself, answering, _love_.

He looks at the tattoos again. “Are you keeping these clean?” When Flint looks up at him, mouth quirked and eyebrow raised, he rolls his eyes. “Yes, I know.” Howell has only recently stopped giving him lectures on maintenance of his leg.

Flint rises to his feet and fetches a rag and bottle from the cupboard near the door, and then holds them out to Silver.

Skeptical, he asks, “You want me to do it?” 

“You’ve had enough visits with Howell to pass yourself off as a doctor the next time you try to join a new crew,” Flint says, sitting down and nodding to the space beside him. Thrown, Silver sinks down next to him, leaning the crutch against the wall and accepting the rum and cloth when Flint hands them over.

Flint is quiet as Silver begins the task of dabbing gently at his skin. He doesn’t flinch, although the alcohol must sting. He just sits there, hands gentle in his lap.

He wants to ask Flint about Gates. About the order of the tattoos: moon, sun, eye within a pyramid. A hierarchy? Simply the whim of the tattooist?

Instead he asks, “Did you get these done in Nassau?”

Flint tilts his head a little, an aborted gesture. When he speaks his voice is a little rough, as if from disuse. “No,” he says, “I asked Abraham to do them for me.”

He tries to picture this, Flint approaching the carpenter, arranging a time to sit for the work. Where—on the ship by candlelight, here in the cabin? Or on the beach, under the sun somewhere?

He can’t figure out why it matters.

Flint’s skin is soft under his fingers. He’s touching it with his free hand and he shouldn’t be, he knows. He watches, outside of himself, as his thumb starts up a rhythm, back and forth over Flint’s upper arm. 

A movement from Flint: the hand attached to the arm not currently being pet by Silver comes up to take the flannel and bottle, set it aside. His movements are slow, careful. He doesn’t dislodge Silver’s hand. 

Silver wants answers to his questions but he also wants to stay like this for however long Flint will let him. He collapses his palm gently over the inked skin. Thinks about holding on and not letting go.

“Where do you hope to die?” He doesn’t look up from his hand covering Flint’s tattoos, but he can sense Flint looking at him. 

After a pause, Flint says, “Here, I suppose. On the Walrus. I honestly haven’t given it much thought.”

The past few months have proven Flint to be someone who openly flaunts death, making a mockery of it. When he finally drags his eyes up to look at Flint’s face, the truth of it is inked plain in his eyes: Flint has thought of little else for years. 

“Cannonball to the face?”

“Most likely.” And there’s a little mirth, there, too. 

Silver doesn’t say what he’s thinking, which is that they'll probably both drink themselves to death in a tavern somewhere. Instead, he flexes his hand and runs his thumb once more over Flint’s moon before letting go, leaning over a little to do up the buttons on Flint’s shirt again.

Nobody touches Flint, but Flint doesn’t seem to mind Silver doing it. 

He goes slowly, as slowly as he can muster without lingering. The last button brings him back to Flint’s neck. He rests the tips of his fingers there. “Perhaps someone will slit your throat while you sleep,” he says.

“That a threat?”

“Yeah,” Silver says, and kisses him.

Under his mouth, Flint makes the softest sound Silver has ever heard. His shirt is beginning to feel familiar to the touch when Silver takes hold of it, grasping the fabric at his chest, tugging a little. His mouth is warm, and wet when he opens up for Silver’s tongue. 

Kissing a man, he thinks, isn’t so different from kissing a woman. Lips, tongues, the soft inside of a cheek. A hand coming up to touch his jaw. He hasn’t thought about it much but if he had he would have thought it would feel foreign, unpleasant. But it isn’t.

Flint is being careful with him, Silver realizes hazily. He tries to push past that, sucking Flint’s tongue, biting his lip. But Flint gentles him, brushing a hand up over his ear and into his hair, pulling back each time Silver tries to draw him out, coming back in with light kisses that seem impossible.

“Easy,” Flint says into the corner of his mouth.

“Shut the fuck up,” Silver replies. He presses close for another kiss, softer this time, an apology.

He wonders how long it’s been since Flint kissed anyone. Rumours of a marriage in all but name to Mrs. Barlow, of an overly-close companionship with Gates—could just as easily be truths as lies. The only one he knows for sure about is Thomas Hamilton. He touches Flint’s shoulder again and tries not to think about it. 

“I didn’t mean to do that,” he says, when they separate.

Flint looks fond, his mouth damp and red where it curls up just slightly. “No?”

 _I’m not like you,_ he wants to say, _I don’t love like you. I don’t know how._

Instead he reaches for the crutch and stands up, turning away, feeling shaky. “I, uh—“ he begins. Clears his throat. “I’ve had quite a lot of rum.”

“Ah,” says Flint. “Yes.”

Silver’s halfway to the door before he turns back to look. It isn’t the rum— leveled off inside him, its grip beginning to wane, replaced with whatever Flint has done to his lungs and heart—that makes him speak next. Something inside him, some curious part of him, still wants answers. “I have a tattoo, you know.”

Flint breathes out audibly through his nose, a half-laugh. “No,” he says, “I didn’t know that.”

He pictures it, Flint’s hands on him, tugging his trousers down to expose his hip. He wants Flint to look at him. To touch his skin and ask him if it’s healed. 

If Flint were someone he had just met in a pub, he might have let his lips curl into a winning smile, might have said something about hunting the ink down on his body. But Flint isn’t a stranger, and what’s more, neither is Silver. 

“Well,” he says, finally, “Good night, Captain.” It sounds, even to his own ears, like he’s saying something else. If only he knew which it was: something to stifle, or something to voice aloud.

“Good night, Silver,” says Flint.

When he emerges on deck he pauses, looks up. He’d never seen a sky so enormous until he’d set out to sea for the first time. By day it is half the world, the sun something to be looked at only in the periphery; by night it is even larger, moon, and stars, and the light flickering on the water. 

If he dies first Flint will not get a tattoo to memorialize him. He wonders what it means that the thought is bitter, sharp in his throat. 

It’s a clear night. The stars above him are innumerable. His shoulder aches. 

**Author's Note:**

> open for suggestions on what silver’s tattoo might be <3


End file.
